By Shawn Gaynor

Jan. 15 (GNT) – The final days of the Bush administration have proved busy ones at the Bureau of Land Management, who announced yesterday that it would be issuing new lease permits in three western states for oil-shale mining and production.

Solid oil-shale is changed into liquid fuel by heating and refining, a process that environmentalist say takes more energy to refine then it yields. Photo courtesy of the US DOE.

The new leasing program and the rule changes that have allowed them end a 79 year ban on oil-shale production in Utah and Wyoming, and expand leasing in Colorado where the ban was lifted in 2001.

Under the new leases the BLM will allow energy companies lease 640 acres of public land for a 10 year period to conduct research, development, and demonstration (know as an R, D, and D leases). During this time companies will experiment with new methods for producing fuel from oil-shale, and will have to demonstrate the economic viability of oil-shale production to expand their lease holdings.

The new leases broaden a previous leasing program of 160 acre R, D, and D leases recently issued by the BLM. Under that program six energy companies were awarded leases.

“Broadening the scope of research into oil shale technologies will help accelerate the development of these vast Western resources, and as a result lessen our dependence on foreign sources of energy,” said James Caswell, BLM Director.

But environmentalists including Melissa Thrailkill of the Center for Biological Diversity, feel that the latest news from the BLM is a step in the wrong direction, telling Green News Today, “We believe oil-shale as a fuel should not be pursued at all. We should be investing in clean energy technologies instead.”

Thrailkill warned that the new methods for extracting fuel from oil-shale, by heating the shale in the ground until a liquid fuel can be extracted and refined into diesel or jet fuel, consume more energy then they produce – essentially trading solid fuels for a smaller amount of liquid fuels.

“Little research is available on oil-shale and its impacts right now because no oil-shale industry exists right now,” said Thrailkill. “However, what we do know is that producing oil-shale fuels require extra refining processes, and the heating of the oil-shale in the ground, which means that you input more energy in oil-shale then you get out.”

But the current leadership at the BLM seems determined to move ahead with oil-shale fuels. The new leases are just one of several steps taken recently by the BLM to pave the way for large scale oil-shale production – production it says could yield up to 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from lands in the Western United States.

In November, the BLM finalized regulations governing the commercial leasing of oil-shale resources on Federal lands, and in September, the agency finalized a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement setting aside approximately 1.9 million acres of public lands in the three states for potential commercial oil shale development.

This prompted a coalition of environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, The Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Sierra Club among others, to responded to the new rules, filing their concerns on Jan. 8 in formal letters to the BLM, notifying the agency of a pending lawsuit issued over the new rules failure to consider their impact on endangered species, and western water supplies.

Speaking about the new BLM leases, Peter Nelson of Defenders of Wildlife said, “It is clear that the ESA legal action is simply one indicator amongst many of the tremendous controversy surrounding oil-shale development, and that given the controversy, the department of the Interior should call a time out, end these midnight threatrics, and reassess the Bush oil-shale legacy.”

According the BLM’s own estimates, the new extraction processes for making fuel out of oil-shale uses roughly three gallons of water for each gallon of fuel produced. With leases being granted in states where water disputes already rage between municipalities, agriculture, environmentalists, and industry, many are wary of the impact industrial scale production of oil-share fuels would have on western water supplies, and what if any impact further water use will have on endangered western marine life.

The groups believe that victory in these suits may overturn oil-shale leases already issued by the BLM.

Ken Salazar, Obama’s pick to head the Department of the Interior, while oversees the BLM, is on record as opposing the BLM’s approach to oil-shale leasing.

In July of 2008 then Sen. Salazar (D-CO) issued a rebuke of Bush’s oil-shale plans, saying, “The Administration is trying to set the stage for a last minute fire sale of commercial oil shale leases in Western Colorado, despite the fact that we are still years away from knowing if the technologies for developing oil shale on a commercial scale are even viable.”

When asked if environmental concerns over oil-shale would receive different treatment under the Obama administration Thrailkill was cautiously optimistic.

“It’s clear that Bush was not an environmental president at all, and we hope we will have a different relationship with the new administration over the oil-shale program.”

She went on to warned that while Salazar has criticized the BLM for its program, he has not come out against exploring new oil-shale technologies, but has rather called for a slower approach.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. holds more than half of the world’s oil shale resources.

Source: GreenNewsToday.org